Israeli startup completes a full SIT pipeline with support from the BIRD Foundation and prepares for large-scale trials in Sub-Saharan Africa
Diptera.ai’s flagship project has reached a major breakthrough. After three years of intensive development—and in partnership with the BIRD Foundation which supports industrial collaboration between Israel and the United States—the Israeli company has completed a full end-to-end system based on the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT), a biological method for mosquito control that relies on releasing sterilized males.
The project delivered a complete operational chain for Anopheles mosquitoes, including rearing, sorting, sterilization, marking, and AI-driven monitoring. The system was subsequently validated on live mosquito populations in Kenya and a second African country. With each technological milestone now achieved, Diptera.ai is preparing for the next step: widescale field trials across Sub-Saharan Africa.
The company was founded in response to the urgent global need to curb the spread of malaria, a disease that kills hundreds of thousands each year. Traditional control methods are losing effectiveness, while SIT offers a clean, targeted alternative that avoids chemical pesticides. Historically, large-scale SIT deployment has been constrained by the inability to sort larvae at high throughput, the lack of reliable training data for AI models, and insufficient real-time monitoring tools.
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Omer Carmel, Director of Business Development at the BIRD Foundation, added:
“BIRD’s investment and guidance in this project highlight our commitment to breakthrough technologies capable of addressing critical global challenges such as malaria prevention. Working with Diptera.ai and Vectech enabled us to support AI-based solutions that deliver tangible results in the field, demonstrating BIRD’s role as a bridge for groundbreaking collaboration between Israeli and American companies.”
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